I don’t like you.
Four words we hate to hear. For some reason, we all like to be liked. No revelation there. It’s how we’re wired. We hate it when people don’t like us - even people we don’t really know. Some of us will do almost anything to be liked. We love to please, even at the expense of our own happiness, values, beliefs and standards.We compromise ourselves a hundred ways and turn ourselves inside-out trying to make others like us, but in that approval-seeking process we often forget who we are and wind up being disliked by the one person whose opinion should matter the most; us.
Newsflash 1: Some people aren’t gonna like you.
Newsflash 2: That’s okay. That’s right - life ain’t fair and even though you may very well be a fantastic human being, some people will find a reason to dislike you no matter what you do or how fabulous you are. Chances are it’s more about their issues than anything you have or haven’t done.
There are people who don’t like me who have never actually met me or had a conversation with me. That’s fine with me. I won’t invest emotional energy into things I can’t change. I will endeavour to be the best I can be and if my best still generates critics and people who find reason to dislike me (which it will), that’s okay.
The only person I can change is me, so I’ll focus on improving, educating and developing myself rather than trying to create a fan club or convince people to like me.
While it’s normal and very human to have the desire to be needed, liked, loved and important to others, it’s also crucial for our development to get clear about who we are and what we stand for, and to live a life consistent with those values - to like ourselves. Otherwise we simply become frustrated People Pleasers.
Newsflash 3: It’s okay to disagree with people. Even people you like and respect.
Newsflash 4: Some people’s overwhelming need to be liked is the very thing that makes them hard to like (there’s some irony for you).
Newsflash 5: For many people, their need to be liked is actually a significant barrier to their personal and professional growth.
When it comes to this issue, you might want to ask yourself these questions:
1. Do I live a life which is consistent with my core values?2. Do I operate with integrity?3. Do I believe that my motives are good?4. Is it my goal to be a positive influence in the lives of others?5. Do I (really) like me? If you answered yes to all of the above, then you’re doing pretty well. If there were more crosses than ticks then you may want to make a few changes. Soon. Some short-term pain for some long-term gain.If you really want to be liked, then stop trying to be liked and start being you.
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What happens in our heads when we set goals?Apparently a lot more than you’d think. Goal setting isn’t quite so simple as deciding on the things you’d like to accomplish and working towards them.
According to the research of psychologists, neurologists, and other scientists, setting a goal invests ourselves into the target as if we’d already accomplished it. That is, by setting something as a goal, however small or large, however near or far in the future, a part of our brain believes that desired outcome is an essential part of who we are - setting up the conditions that drive us to work towards the goals to fulfill the brain’s self-image.
Apparently the brain cannot distinguish between things we want and things we have. Neurologically, then, our brains treat the failure to achieve our goal the same way as it treats the loss of a valued possession. And up until the moment the goal is achieved, we have failed to achieve it, setting up a constant tension that the brain seeks to resolve.
Ideally, this tension is resolved by driving us towards accomplishment. In many cases, though, the brain simply responds to the loss, causing us to feel fear, anxiety, even anguish, depending on the value of the as-yet-unattained goal.
Love, Loss, Dopamine, and Our Dreams
The brains functions are carried out by a stew of chemicals called neurotransmitters. You’ve probably heard of serotonin, which plays a key role in our emotional life - most of the effective anti-depressant medications on the market are serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning they regulate serotonin levels in the brain leading to more stable moods.
Somewhat less well-known is another neurotransmitter, dopamine. Among other things, dopamine acts as a motivator, creating a sensation of pleasure when the brain is stimulated by achievement. Dopamine is also involved in maintaining attention - some forms of ADHD are linked to irregular responses to dopamine.
So dopamine plays a key role in keeping us focused on our goals and motivating us to attain them, rewarding our attention and achievement by elevating our mood. That is, we feel good when we work towards our goals.
Dopamine is related to wanting - to desire. The attainment of the object of our desire releases dopamine into our brains and we feel good. Conversely, the frustration of our desires starves us of dopamine, causing anxiety and fear.
One of the greatest of desires is romantic love - the long-lasting, “till death do us part” kind. It’s no surprise, then, that romantic love is sustained, at least in part, through the constant flow of dopamine released in the presence - real or imagined - of our true love. Loss of romantic love cuts off that supply of dopamine, which is why it feels like you’re dying - your brain responds by triggering all sorts of anxiety-related responses.
Herein lies obsession, as we go to ever-increasing lengths in search of that dopamine reward. Stalking specialists warn against any kind of contact with a stalker, positive or negative, because any response at all triggers that reward mechanism. If you let the phone ring 50 times and finally pick up on the 51st ring to tell your stalker off, your stalker gets his or her reward, and learns that all s/he has to do is wait for the phone to ring 51 times.
Romantic love isn’t the only kind of desire that can create this kind of dopamine addiction, though - as Captain Ahab knew well, any suitably important goal can become an obsession once the mind has established ownership.
The Neurology of Ownership
Ownership turns out to be about a lot more than just legal rights. When we own something, we invest a part of ourselves into it - it becomes an extension of ourselves.
In a famous experiment at Cornell University, researchers gave students school logo coffee mugs, and then offered to trade them chocolate bars for the mugs. Very few were willing to make the trade, no matter how much they professed to like chocolate. Big deal, right? Maybe they just really liked those mugs!
But when they reversed the experiment, handing out chocolate and then offering to trade mugs for the candy, they found that now, few students were all that interested in the mugs. Apparently the key thing about the mugs or the chocolate wasn’t whether students valued whatever they had in their possession, but simply that they had it in their possession.
This phenomenon is called the “endowment effect”. In a nutshell, the endowment effect occurs when we take ownership of an object (or idea, or person); in becoming “ours” it becomes integrated with our sense of identity, making us reluctant to part with it (losing it is seen as a loss, which triggers that dopamine shut-off I discussed above).
Interestingly, researchers have found that the endowment effect doesn’t require actual ownership or even possession to come into play. In fact, it’s enough to have a reasonable expectation of future possession for us to start thinking of something as a part of us - as jilted lovers, gambling losers, and 7-year olds denied a toy at the store have all experienced.
The Upshot for Goal-Setters
So what does all this mean for would-be achievers?
On one hand, it’s a warning against setting unreasonable goals. The bigger the potential for positive growth a goal has, the more anxiety and stress your brain is going to create around it’s non-achievement.
It also suggests that the common wisdom to limit your goals to a small number of reasonable, attainable objectives is good advice. The more goals you have, the more ends your brain thinks it “owns” and therefore the more grief and fear the absence of those ends is going to cause you.
On a more positive note, the fact that the brain rewards our attentiveness by releasing dopamine means that our brains are working with us to direct us to achievement. Paying attention to our goals feels good, encouraging us to spend more time doing it.Therefore, ultimately our brains want us to achieve our goals, so that a sense of who we are can be fulfilled. And that’s pretty good news!
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This is an inspiring example of the Virual Web.
Dancing With the Universe
By Jim WalshThe video was downloaded to the web on Saturday, June 20, 2008. By Sunday, it had 1 million hits. By Thursday, it was everywhere – imbedded on Facebook and MySpace pages and flooding email inboxes and translating into millions of viewers, thousands of comments, and official “gone viral” status.But this one is no YouTube vanity trip. This one is different. This one feels important, necessary, and artistic; a concrete manifestation of the change that the world’s leaders have been preaching at a time when the human race could use a little pick-me-up, a little jig in its step. This one is a high-definition television commercial for hope.
“Pretty cool, huh?,” said Matt Harding, when it was suggested to him that, for the first time in history, someone – him – got the entire planet dancing together to the same song.
To read the rest and see the video, go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruYAlready dubbed ‘the best movie of 2008′
To wit: Dancing by the video-game designer turned videomaker Harding, is a thing of such unbridled joy and connectivity that one film critic, Erik Lundegaard, has already dubbed it “the best movie of 2008″ on his blog. And why not? Times-infinity planetwide goose bumps can’t be wrong.
“I hadn’t even had a chance to sit down and look at until yesterday,” said Harding, a 31-year-old native of Westport, Conn., Thursday by phone from his home in Seattle.Courtesy of Palbasha Siddique”I finished the trip at the beginning of June. I got home, then we had to record the music, and we shot the last clip in Seattle, and then I had about 10 days to edit the thing and get it done.”It wasn’t until yesterday that I finally had a quiet moment to sit down and watch it and sort of try to understand the response it’s been getting since I put it up. It’s been really amazing.”The sum effect of “Dancing,” which is called “Where the Hell Is Matt (2008)” on YouTube, is just that –especially when coupled with the ephemeral music created by Harding’s friend Gary Schyman and sung by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh who will be a senior at Minneapolis Southwest High School this year.‘People are making ring tones out of it’
“It’s crazy,” said Siddique, who lives in Northeast Minneapolis with her mother and brother. “Right now it’s number one on amazon.com in the soundtrack [category], and number six overall, so that’s a really big accomplishment, because even ‘American Idol’ is number nine right now. I just never knew this would turn out so incredible. People are making ring tones out of it. Everyone on Facebook is adding me, and I had no idea there are so many Bengalis in our community, and they have all heard the song.”
“Dancing” has its roots in two previous Harding-dancing videos, which were similar — if lesser — Internet sensations in which Harding danced alone. The videos caught the attention of Stride gum, which helped finance Harding’s travel and production budget.
Courtesy of Palbasha SiddiqueHarding dances in a recording session with Siddique.
In the FAQ section of his website, Harding writes, “In 2007 Matt went back to Stride with another idea. He realized his bad dancing wasn’t actually all that interesting, and that other people were much better at being bad at it. He showed them his inbox, which, as a result of his semi-famousness, was overflowing with emails from all over the planet. He told them he wanted to travel around the world one more time and invite the people who’d written him to come out and dance too.”
Over the course of 14 months, Harding traveled to 42 countries and, simply, filmed himself dancing with folks. Now he has a publicist to help him field interview requests. And to think it all started in Hanoi, when a friend suggested, “go do that stupid dance you do and I’ll film it.”
He just kept dancing
“It started off as a goof; and then I just kept doing that on the trip I was on,” said Harding.
“I started collecting [videos of himself dancing] as mementos. There was no higher thought to it than the person who brings a T-shirt or a stuffed animal and takes pictures of themselves everywhere they go. It just happened to be that dancing has more of a profound meaning to people.
“[On] the first videos I danced alone, but when I went to Rwanda it was by far and away my favorite clip of that [previous] video. It was so much more fun to dance with other people.
“I’m not much of an extrovert, so it would have been hard to go up to people and say, `Will you dance with me?’ So the second video created an opportunity to find people. My girlfriend (Melissa Nixon) produced it for me, and everywhere we went, we organized these big events where we’d dance.”
And what exactly does he call that step he’s doing?
‘The human metronome’
“I call myself the human metronome, because once the people start running in, I’m just this thing keeping the time in the background,” he said. “When you watch it, your eye shifts to all these different people doing these crazy things. I’ve found that everybody sort of gravitates to the same things, from clip to clip. You see the guy in Stockholm on the far right, you see the girl in Poland with her hand on her skirt — all these little nuances that are fun.”
When it came to the accompanying music, Harding and Schyman knew they didn’t want to weigh down the footage with cheesy lyrics or over-the-top sentimentality.
“We were talking to a very popular musician who was interested in singing on it, but it didn’t come together and we ended up kind of stuck,” said Harding. “We were really struggling with lyrics: How do you write lyrics for a video like that without it being clichéd? And I said to Gary, `What if we did it in a foreign language?’
“And he brought up this poet, Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian poet who won the Nobel Prize, and I went looking through his poetry and found this “Stream of Life’ poem that talks about life and being and dance, and I thought, `This is perfect.’ So we had the lyrics, but we didn’t have someone who could sing it in native Bengali.”
Looking for a singer
Enter Harding’s girlfriend, Nixon, a recruiter for Google who set out to find a singer. In short order she stumbled upon Siddique, whose father is a brigadier general in the Bangladesh army, and whose family settled in Northeast Minneapolis when Palbasha Siddique was awarded a scholarship to MacPhail Center for the Arts. A singer her entire life (she recorded her first CD when she was 7 and sang “God Bless America” before a Twins game when she was 11), Siddique studied at De La Salle High School and transferred to Southwest last year when she was accepted into the International Baccalaureate program.
At the moment, she is one of the most heard singers in the world. She is forming a band and releasing a new CD next week. She intends to study at Harvard Law. She is, in other words, on fire.
“I’m not on fire yet,” she laughed. “I want the whole world to know me one day. It’s just not there yet, but it’ll get there.”
“With God’s help,” said her mother, in the background.
“Yes,” said Siddique; “if God helps me.”
As it turns out, God must work for KFAI-FM, the Minneapolis-based community radio station where Harding and Nixon first heard Siddique’s archived voice, which suggests the Bangladesh-Minneapolis soul sister of Pakistani mystic/singer Sheila Chandra.
Interviewed about war in Bangladesh
“I was being interviewed on a show about the war in Bangladesh, which my father is fighting in,” says Siddique. “For some reason, the woman asked me to sing four lines from a song, and so I did, with no background music or anything. The video quality of it was so bad I asked the [program engineer] not to upload it. But he did, and it’s good after all, because that’s how Matt found me.”
Harding flew Siddique and her mother to Los Angeles to record the track, and paid her $1,000.
“The recording could have gone disastrously,” said Harding. “She’s 17 years old, but she absolutely had the chops and she had this incredibly powerful voice and was able to give us this amazing performance.
“We were working with L.A. engineers and musicians who were just going, `How did you just find this girl?’ It was all just very serendipitous, and when you’ve got that serendipity going, you just get out of the way and let it happen.”
Which could be said about the “Dancing” video as a whole. Harding is reluctant to put into words what the video’s “message” is, other than “it’s just people dancing … so it’s very simple, and very complex.”
Not to mention unprecedented.
“It’s true,” he said. “This is something that hasn’t been possible until very recently: The ability to travel all around the world like this, and get to all these places, and have access to these people, and to do it with a high-definition camera that weighs less than a pound and get it out to the entire planet, is all very new.”
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I love dancing. As many of you know I was a DJ for many years in the night clubs of Toronto. I’ve done just about every kind of party you can imagine. A couple of years ago I recieved this Youtube link and i believe it’s still the best I’ve ever seen. It captures songs from all of the era’s. This amatuer does it like a master enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg
Cheers Casey
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Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right, and the other is usually the husband.
When our lawn mower broke and wouldn’t run, my wife kept hinting to me that I should get it fixed. But, somehow I always had something else to take care of first: the truck, the car, e-mail, fishing, always something more important to me.
Finally she thought of a clever way to make her point. When I arrived home one day, I found her seated in the tall grass, busily snipping away with a tiny pair of sewing scissors. I watched silently for a short time and then went into the house.I was gone only a few minutes.. When I came out again I handed her a toothbrush. When you finish cutting the grass, I said, you might as well sweep the driveway.
The doctors say I will walk again, but I will always have a limp.
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My dear friend Robert Rohm recently wrote an article that I wanted to share with you. Robert is a master at understanding people and personalities. You can visiti his website at www.personality-insights.com
Dr Robert Rohm writes,
One night recently my daughter, Elizabeth, was showing me an aquarium full of tadpoles. She had purchased a whole bag full of them for her children (my grandchildren) to watch grow from tadpoles into frogs. It was fun watching all of those little wiggly creatures swimming around in the aquarium! It brought back many fond memories of my own childhood, playing with “critters” down at my grandparent’s house.
I noticed that there was a big rock in the aquarium. When I asked her why she put a rock right in the middle of the tadpoles’ environment, Elizabeth told me an interesting story. I can hardly believe that I have lived almost fifty-nine years without having heard it because it is so good.
Elizabeth said that when she went to the pet store to buy the tadpoles, the gentleman told her to be sure to put a big rock right in the middle of the aquarium. The tadpoles must have this obstacle to give them the incentive to climb up and thus split their little wiggly tails so that their legs can begin to develop. If they have no rock or obstacle to climb up on, they will never turn into frogs. They cannot learn how to hop by just swimming around in water. They must have something causing resistance to give them the incentive to leap forward.
The man went on to tell her that last year a school teacher came back to the store and complained because none of her tadpoles had ever turned into frogs. She had put all of them in an aquarium and let them swim around but they never became frogs. He asked her if she had put a big obstacle, like a rock, in the middle of the aquarium. She said that she had not. She did not know that a tadpole will remain a tadpole unless it faces some obstacle or barrier that forces it to grow. Neither did I, but it makes perfect sense.
So, my daughter was excited to show me all of the tadpoles swimming around the rock. In time, they will begin to try to climb up it and eventually they will make the transformation into a more fully mature creature.
I was amazed and delighted to hear that story. It helped me begin to see, once again, why we have obstacles and barriers in front of us. They are not there to hinder us, but they are there to cause us to grow. It is not so much what the object is in front of each one of us that matters as much as it is our attitude towards it. If we realize that the obstacle we are facing is really a gift that has come our way to help us grow and mature, we will be much more likely to face it in a positive manner.
Since I watched those tadpoles the other night and saw the big rock in their aquarium, I have begun to see the obstacles I face in a different way. Instead of being rocks in my path, those obstacles have become stepping stones to help me leap forward in whatever situation I find myself.
I know that those little tadpoles have no idea what is going on. They just are not that smart. The truth of the matter is, neither are we. Most of us have no idea what is going on in our lives either. We don’t understand that the barriers and obstacles, challenges, difficulties and hard times that come our way each day are actually there for a purpose. There is no way we will have the incentive to grow, or to become better, or to strive harder, if everything in life is just a simple situation. I know the harder I work at anything, the more profitable it is for me, not only financially, but personally, in my own heart and character as well.
So, the next time you see a frog hopping around, smile at him and thank him for the lesson, remembering the struggle he has gone through to get where he is. Perhaps out in the wild somewhere, he faced a difficult rock or barrier in his life, but rather than swimming away from it, he just crawled up on it and began to develop his personal strength until he eventually matured to become the frog that you see hopping around.
I have a whole new appreciation for tadpoles and frogs. Don’t you?
Tip: Obstacles are there to help you.
Have a great week! God bless you!
Robert Rohm Ph.D.
Personality Insights, Inc.
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Just try reading this without laughing till you cry!!!
Pocket Taser Stun Gun, a great gift for the wife. A guy who purchased his lovely wife a pocket Taser for their anniversary submitted this:Last weekend I saw something at Larry’s Pistol & Pawn Shop that sparked my interest. The occasion was our 15th anniversary and I was looking for a little something extra for my wife Julie. What I came across was a 100,000-volt, pocket/purse-sized taser. The effects of the taser were supposed to be short lived, with no long-term adverse affect on your assailant, allowing her adequate time to retreat to safety….??
WAY TOO COOL! Long story short, I bought the device and brought it home. I loaded two AAA batteries in the darn thing and pushed the but ton. Nothing! I was disappointed. I learned, however, that if I pushed the button AND pressed it against a metal surface at the same time; I’d get the blue arc of electricity darting back and forth between the prongs. AWESOME!!!
Unfortunately, I have yet to explain to Julie what that burn spot is on the face of her microwave.
Okay, so I was home alone with this new toy, thinking to myself that it couldn’t be all that bad with only two triple-A batteries, right? There I sat in my recliner, my cat Gracie looking on intently (trustinglittle soul) while I was reading the directions and thinking that I really needed to try this thing out on a flesh & blood moving target.
I must admit I thought about zapping Gracie (for a fraction of a second) and thought better of it. She is such a sweet cat. But, if I was going to give this thing to my wife to protect herself against a mugger, I did want some assurance that it would work as advertised. Am I wrong?
So, there I sat in a pair of shorts and a tank top with my reading glasses perched delicately on the bridge of my nose, directions in one hand, and taser in another.
The directions said that a one-second burst would shock and disorient your assailant; a two-second burst was supposed to cause muscle spasms and a major loss of bodily control; a three-second burst would purportedly make your assailant flop on the ground like a fish out of water. Any burst longer than three seconds would be wasting the batteries. All the while I’m looking at this little device measuring about 5′ long, less than 3/4 inch in circumference; pretty cute really and (loaded with two itsy, bitsy triple-A batteries) thinking to myself, ‘no possible way!’What happened next is almost beyond description, but I’ll do my best…?
I’m sitting there alone, Gracie looking on with her head cocked to one side as to say, ‘don’t do it dipshit,’ reasoning that a one second burst from such a tiny little ole thing couldn’t hurt all that bad. I decided to give myself a one second burst just for heck of it. I touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and . . . HOLY CRAP . . . WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION . . . WHAT THE HELL!!! I’m pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me
up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and over and over again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples on fire, testicles nowhere to be found, with my left arm tucked under my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs? The cat was making meowing sounds I had never heard before, clinging to a picture frame hanging above the fireplace, obviously in an atempt to avoid getting slammed by my body flopping all over the living room.
Note: If you ever feel compelled to ‘mug’ yourself with a taser, one note of caution: there is no such thing as a one second burst when you zap yourself!
You will not let go of that thing until it is dislodged from your hand by a violent thrashing about on the floor. A three second burst would be considered conservative?
A minute or so later (I can’t be sure, as time was a relative thing at that point), I collected my wits (what little I had left), sat up and surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of the fireplace. The recliner was upside down and about 8 feet or so from where it originally was. My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face felt like it had been shot up with Novacain, and my bottom lip weighed 88 lbs. I had no control over the drooling. Apparrently I shit myself, but was too numb to know for sure and my sense of smell was gone. I saw a faint smoke cloud above my head which I believe came from my hair. I’m still looking for my nuts and I’m offering a significant reward for their safe return!!
P. S. My wife loved the gift, and now regularly threatens me with it!
‘If you think Education is difficult, try being stupid.’
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